Sun Editor Rebekah Wade made headlines herself this week when she moved from the newsroom to the boardroom to become the Chief Executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

It has taken Ms Wade, 41, twenty years to rise from a researcher on the News of the World magazine to become a powerful media mover-and-shaker with close contacts in Westminster and Show Business.

It’s perhaps surprising that the queen of Britain’s red tops has a degree in French from La Sorbonne when you’d imagine that most tabloid editors would assume Ile De La Cite was a fancy pie and mash shop for East End barrow boys.

But there are many linguists on Up To Speed’s list of 75 well-known journalists.

It may seem obvious that if you hope to become a foreign correspondent an ability to speak the language will help. Thomson Reuters has traditionally recruited many of the country’s brightest language graduates to use those skills. The Oxford-educated BBC Diplomatic Correspondent Bridget Kendall must have found her fluent Russian handy when she worked as a Moscow Correspondent. However, if you look at other people on the BBC’s extensive list of high-profile foreign correspondents, you’ll also find that knowledge of the native tongue is regarded as less important than an ability to report from anywhere and to tell a story compellingly. Kate Adie’s degree in Scandinavian Studies from Newcastle has never limited the scope of her reporting to peaceful democracies fringing the Baltic.

Indeed, many language graduates are not ostensibly using their skills at all in their day-to-day jobs. Before they read the news, Fiona Bruce read French and Italian at Oxford and Huw Edwards read French at Cardiff. Their boss at BBC News, Kevin Bakhurst read French and German at Cambridge. BBC presenters Sophie Raworth and Joanna Gosling read Modern Languages at Manchester and Birmingham respectively, Dani Sinha read French and Latin at Bristol.

Channel 4 News’ Brigid Nzekwu took a language degree in London.  

In the field, two of the BBC’s front-line reporters will have found their knowledge of Arabic and Islam invaluable. The former Baghdad Correspondent Caroline Hawley read Arabic at Oxford, while the Security Correspondent Frank Gardner studied it at Exeter.

And while they may not have found it possible to apply their linguistic skills in the modern world, Boris Johnson and Radio 4 Presenter Martha Kearney have clearly put to good use the four years they spent studying Classics on the Greats course at Oxford.

So, languages can be useful in journalism. Quod erat demonstrandum. Tomorrow, we look at journalists who’ve studied zoology, physics and journalism.

The latest volley in an unseemly row over TV newsreaders’ qualifications was fired by ITV anchor Mary Nightingale today.

She leapt to the defence of the glamorous so-called “auto-cuties” who read our nightly news bulletins, pointing out that most of them have brains as well as beauty.

Ms Nightingale was responding to the veteran newscaster Peter Sissons, who reportedly said that Five News’ £1m a year presenter Natasha Kaplinsky had “done very well out of her looks”.

Sissons, 66, who was shot in the legs while covering the Biafra war for ITN, said he believed all news readers should have earned their spurs as frontline reporters.

However, if you take a step further back in their careers, you’ll find that Kaplinsky and Sissons, broadcasting beauty and latter-day Boot of The Beast, have something in common.

They both went to Oxford. 

A few years ago some research by the Sutton Trust found that a whopping two-fifths of graduate journalists had spent three years studying beneath its dreaming spires.

This week, Up To Speed will be taking a closer look at the university days of some of Britain’s highest profile journalists to see how they made the transition from student to star reporter.

Looking at the backgrounds of 75 journalists we’ve found that 30 went to Oxford, 13 went to Cambridge and 32 went to other universities.

We’ll start tomorrow by looking at the single most popular subject from our list -  English.